War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Via ClimateProgress this morning: We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in…
The earth is indeed melting away. Â (Illustration found here). Clouds, those wispy, sometimes dark and ominoness floating forms we all take for granted as part of our natural environment whenever we look up — when clouds move into together and won’t let the sun shine in, everyone gets a little bit sad. Now start…
Still more grim news, but today’s particular sack of shit is more ethics and morals than anything else. Three stories that reflect our times — strange/bad and getting worse — and how lopsided situations have become as if a giant screw is being tightened down. The first item concerns a near-invisible US horror — coal ash dump-ponds,…
Just as I get my Jeep Commache finally running right and back on the road — a near-two-year traumatic odyssey — fuel prices at the pump are starting to go up again, rising 20 cents in less than a month. Here in northern California, we’re now paying $3.25 a gallon, well above the national upwardly-mobile US…
Still more bad news from the war on weather. Changes in climate the next few years will create a disaster scenario beyond even the old chesnut of “biblical proportions” as all kinds of bad shit will force the mass movement of many peoples. From Agence France-Presse today (via Raw Story): Tens of millions of people…
Apparently, this global-warming scenario seems to be getting worse. This morning from the Washington Post: Sea levels could rise faster along the U.S. East Coast than in any other densely populated part of the world, new research shows, as changes in ice caps and ocean currents push water toward a shoreline inlaid with cities, resort…
An understated environmental report today from the UK, calling climate change the biggest global-health threat of the 21st century. Lead author of the report Professor Anthony Costello: “The big message of this report is that climate change is a health issue affecting billions of people, not just an environmental issue about polar bears and deforestation. The…
Toxic Hog Dump (h/t to tristero at Hullabaloo). From December 2006 rollingstone.com: Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate…
As all the world’s current problems and entanglements become more tightly bound together in a kind of Gordian knot, one item seems to be fading from any public discourse — the end of oil. Although there’s a lot of deniers out there — especially the current GOP crowd of “Drill, drill, drill” — more than 95 percent…
Another strange little twist in modern living. From the BBC this week: The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits…